A wideband 360° photonic-assisted microwave phase shifter using a polarization modulator and a polarization-maintaining fiber Bragg grating

A novel approach to implementing a wideband microwave photonic phase shifter by a joint use of a polarization modulator (PolM) and a polarization-maintaining fiber Bragg grating (PM-FBG) is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. A microwave signal to be phase shifted is applied to the PolM. Two phase-modulated signals along the two principal axes of the PolM are generated and sent to the PM-FBG. The phase-modulated signals have a static but complementary phase shift introduced by the dc bias applied to the PolM. Due to the birefringence of the polarization-maintaining (PM) fiber, the PM-FBG has two spectrally separated and orthogonally polarized reflection bands. By employing the PM-FBG to reflect one first-order sideband along one polarization direction and one optical carrier along the other polarization direction, and send them back to the PolM, a second-time phase modulation is imposed to the sideband and the optical carrier. By sending the two signals to a polarizer and beating them at a photodetector, a phase shifted microwave signal is obtained. Since the PolM is used twice, a low dc bias voltage would lead to a large phase shift. A full 360° microwave photonic phase shifter over a frequency range of 30-40 GHz is experimentally demonstrated. The spurious free dynamic range (SFDR) of the phase shifter is also studied.